Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken to warning his counterparts in European nations, such as the United Kingdom and France, tha, if they continue to appease Hamas because many of their inhabitants feel appalled by what is happening in Gaza, they could soon find themselves up against an equally ruthless enemy who knowingly benefits from the suffering of civilians it says it is protecting and is more than happy to see them die. Thanks to the ubiquity of mobile phones which can be used as cameras and send videos to news organisations eager to broadcast whatever comes their way, Hamas is making up for its battleground defeats by winning the propaganda war hands down.
‘Bibi’ Netanyahu is asking Europeans and North Americans how would they react if they were attacked by armies of murderous fanatics who raped and killed women, incinerated babies, savagely slaughtered and mutilated the men they came across, and then dragged hundreds of hostages back to their strongholds, all the while filming their deeds and expecting other to applaud them? Nobody knows the answer to the question he is posing but if what the Allies did to German and Japanese cities in World War II is anything to go by (perhaps it is not because so much has changed since then), they would make no attempt to spare presumably innocent civilians from their wrath. If they were like their recent forebears, they would certainly do far less than the Israelis to minimise what is euphemistically called “collateral damage.” Instead, they would make full use of their firepower to obliterate the enemy.
Hamas is a Jihadist organisation much like the Islamic State, which in its founding charter showed itself to be virulently anti-Semitic, although in a later version “Jew” is replaced by “Zionist” to make the text more palatable to non-Muslims. Along with other Jihadists, Hamas wants the flag of Islam to fly over the entire planet and takes it for granted that to achieve this, extreme violence will have to be used to cow into submission the unbelievers who are, the Quran reminds the faithful, the worst of all living creatures in the eyes of Allah.
Westerners are reluctant to take any of this seriously. The standard view is that Islam is an essentially benign religion and that, had it not been for the imperialistic behaviour of Europeans and North Americans, its devotees would limit themselves to doing good works. Though this may be true of “ordinary” Muslims, opinion polls show that a fairly large and very influential minority sympathises with the ultras, which is why terrorist groups and “lone wolves” keep cropping up and committing massacres of people they find objectionable such as homosexuals and young folk who attend pop concerts. One might have thought that the carnage at the Bataclan theatre in Paris, where over 500 were killed or wounded, at an Ariana Grande concert in the Manchester Arena in which 22 died and the one in Moscow last year with 150 dead and almost three times as many badly injured, would have served to concentrate minds but this has not happened.
For many decades, appeasement was a dirty word in the political lexicon because it brought to mind the run-up to World War II when the British, accompanied by the French, thought Hitler would be satisfied with a slightly bigger share of the European cake and that after being allowed to get it would leave them alone, but it now dominates policy towards Muslim Jihadism. With the exception of some in the Eastern marches of Europe, governments are more afraid of aggravating communal tensions than of the problems arising from giving in readily to Muslim demands, which is why in a growing number of European countries desecrating the Quran, but not the Judeo-Christian Bible, can get you a jail sentence, and Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron say they will recognise a Palestinian state unless Israel does far more to alleviate hunger in Gaza. Their stance has earned them praise from Hamas.
Has the thought that rewarding in this manner hostage-taking and the use of human shields is bound to encourage other terrorist organisations to do the same entered into the calculations of Starmer and Macron? Apparently it did not occur to them. In any event, the reason the conciliatory approach they favour is in fashion is easy enough to understand. In democracies with large Muslim enclaves, many politicians want the votes they are able to provide and go out of their way to court their often self-appointed civic leaders. What is more, thanks to immigration on a quite unprecedented scale, the enclaves which already exist are growing fast. It is frequently pointed out that in recent decades far more people from abroad have settled, legally or not, in the United Kingdom than in the preceding 1,000 or so years going all the way back to Anglo-Saxon times. The political and strategic implications of the demographic transformation taking place have some worried but few among the ruling class seem willing to think much about them.
Could what is happening in the Middle East be just a prelude to a similar drama in Europe and other parts of the West? Israelis have grown accustomed to seeing themselves as “canaries in the mine” whose experience will, sooner or later, be shared by many others. They suspect that more and more Westerners are repudiating them not just because they are sorry for the Palestinian Arabs but also out of fear for their own future in a world becoming increasingly hostile towards them. Israelis also notice that, unless they can be blamed for a humanitarian disaster, like the ones currently taking place in Sudan, Syria and other parts of the Muslim world, few outsiders will pay much attention to it. As some say: “No Jews, no news.”
Many Europeans and North Americans see Israel as a Western colonial outpost. They tend to overlook the fact that almost half the population is of Mizrahi extraction whose families fled or were forcibly expelled from countries in the Middle East or North Africa. Unlike the Jews whose ancestors came from Europe, they have few illusions about their Muslim neighbours and do not regard them as fitting “partners for peace”. Since the atrocities of October, 2023, far more of the Mizrahis’ Ashkenazi compatriots have come round to their way of thinking. It would appear that “peaceniks,” like the ones who bore the brunt of that terrible Jihadist onslaught, have become far harder to find than before. Israelis now are well aware that their physical survival will depend entirely on the military prowess of the Israeli Defence Forces and that it would be suicidal for them to try to win over the so-called “international community” as represented by institutions such as the United Nations which are controlled by the Islamists and their “progressive” leftist allies.
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